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Energy Debate Yields Little Middle Ground

By Tom Zeller Jr. January 22, 2010 8:38 amJanuary 22, 2010 8:38 am

The Associated PressRobert Kennedy Jr., the environmental activist, makes a point during a debate over energy and coal with Don L. Blankenship, left, the chief executive of the coal company Massey Energy. The University of Charleston’s president, Ed Welch, right, moderated.

CHARLESTON, W. Va. — Speaking ahead of Thursday evening’s debate between a coal executive, Don L. Blankenship of Massey Energy, and an environmental lawyer, Robert Kennedy Jr., the University of Charleston’s president, Ed Welch, expressed hope that he might nudge the two men “beyond their talking points.”

But such moments were rare over the course of the nearly two-hour forum (full audio is here). Mr. Kennedy broadly assailed the coal industry’s highly mechanized surface-mining techniques, while Mr. Blankenship called environmental concerns over the coal business unfounded and an assault on American energy security and hardworking families who depend on coal for a living.

“These companies are liquidating the state for cash,” Mr. Kennedy said in an impassioned opening salvo, in which he argued that the coal industry’s concerns about the survival of mining communities were specious.

Some 50 years ago, over 120,000 coal industry workers pulled the resource from underground mines in West Virginia, Mr. Kennedy said. Today, companies like Massey Energy rely on contentious techniques like mountaintop removal, in which explosives and vast machinery are used to lop off hilltops to expose coal seams for easy extraction.

Beyond the environmental implications of such techniques, Mr. Kennedy argued, fewer miners are needed to produce the same amount of coal, and some 90,000 mining jobs have been lost in the state as a result.

Mr. Blankenship, the chief executive of Massey Energy, countered that “every industry in the world that has survived the difficulties of business competition has mechanized.”

He also said it was dangerous for environmentalists from other states to come to West Virginia and attempt to kill off an industry that still provides thousands of jobs, two-thirds of state tax revenue and provides cheap and abundant electricity.

“If we forget that, we’re going to have to learn to speak Chinese,” Mr. Blankenship said, apparently alluding to China’s massive construction of power plants.

Mr. Kennedy noted that China was also investing trillions of dollars in renewable energy development. But Mr. Blankenship scoffed at the economics of wind and solar power, which, he said, cannot survive without generous government subsidies.

Mr. Kennedy countered that when ordinary citizens are made to pay expenses that fossil fuel industries consider “externalities” — the costs of environmental degradation, for example, or increased health care expenses arising from coal pollution — those industries are enjoying enormous subsidies as well.

“In a true free-market system,” Mr. Kennedy said, “the price of a product would reflect all of its costs.”

Amid occasional hoots and cheers from the audience (the men were given 200 tickets each to seed the crowd with an equal number of supporters), the conversation covered broad but familiar ground — from Clean Water Act violations to global warming.

The Associated PressCoal is what made the United States strong, said Massey Energy C.E.O. Don L. Blankenship. “If we forget that, we’re going to have to learn to speak Chinese.”

Mr. Blankenship invoked the recent “Climategate” e-mail scandal, in which messages purloined from a server at a British climate research center suggested that some prominent scientists may have fudged some data to support evidence of human-driven global warming.

Mr. Kennedy refused to engage the scientific debate, suggesting only that the cost to society of acting to prevent global warming — even if the science is ultimately proved wrong — is a legacy of cleaner fuels, a healthier environment and energy independence.

In the end, both men spoke directly to their constituencies, with little evidence of middle ground. For the coal executive, the arguments of the activist were trifling — and even remiss in failing to appreciate what he considered more pressing human suffering elsewhere.

“The environmental movement represents itself as a savior of mankind,” Mr. Blankenship said. But quibbling over “one part per million of iron” in a West Virginia water sample was shameful, he suggested, when “millions of people starve to death in the world.”

Environmental regulation, Mr. Blankenship added, ought to be balanced with the pressing needs of global economic development and overall prosperity. In West Virginia — and around the world — coal remains one of the cheapest and most abundant means for achieving that, he said.

Mr. Kennedy called the characterization “a false choice” and that “good environmental policy is good economic policy.”

Companies like Massey Energy want to “treat the planet like it’s a business in liquidation,” Mr. Kennedy said, and to “have few years of pollution-based prosperity.”

Should society continue down that road, he said, “our children are going to pay for our joy ride.”

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